Alain Badiou
Today, Lenin's political works are being entirely revisited through the
canonical opposition between democracy and totalitarian dictatorship.
Yet the truth is that this debate has already taken place. For it was
equally on the basis of the category of democracy that from 1918
onwards, Western social democrats, lead by Karl Kautsky, attempted
to discredit not just the Bolshevik revolution in its historical unfolding,
but Lenin's political thought as such.
What can still be of interest to us here, above all, is Lenin's theoretical
response to this official attack, which was contained in particular in
the pamphlet that Kautsky published in Vienna in 1918 under the
title The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and to which Lenin responded
with his famous text, The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the
Renegade.
Kautsky, as behoves a declared partisan of the representative and
parliamentary political regime, puts almost all the emphasis on the
question of the right to vote. What is altogether remarkable is that
Lenin regards this procedure as the very essence of Kautsky's
'renegation'. Not that Lenin thinks that upholding the right to vote is in
any way a theoretical error. On the contrary, Lenin thinks that it can
certainly be useful, or even necessary, to participate in elections. He
will reiterate this view with violence, against the absolute adversaries
of parliamentary vote, in his pamphlet on leftism. What Lenin
reproaches Kautsky with is far subtler and more interesting. Had
Kautsky said: I oppose the Russian Bolsheviks' decision to deny the
right to vote to reactionaries and exploiters, he would have taken a
stance on what Lenin calls an essentially Russian question, and not on
the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat in general. He could
then have entitled his pamphlet Against the Bolsheviks. Politically, things
would have been clear. But this is not what Kautsky did. Kautsky
claimed to intervene on the question of the dictatorship of the
proletariat in general, and of democracy in general. To do this on the
grounds of a tactical and localised decision in Russia is the essence of
'renegation'. The essence of 'renegation' is always to argue from a
tactical circumstance in order to renege on principles; to start from a
secondary contradiction in order to pronounce a revisionist judgement
on that conception of politics which defines it as a matter of principles.
Let us look in greater detail at how Lenin proceeds. I quote:
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Let us note that we are not dealing with a dialectical scheme. Nothing
allows one to foresee a synthesis, an internal overcoming of
contradiction. On the contrary, everything points to the suppression of
one of the terms. The century is a figure of the non-dialectical
juxtaposition of the Two and the One. The question here is to know
what is the century's assessment of dialectical thought. In the
victorious result, is the motor antagonism itself or the desire of the
One? This is one of the main philosophical questions of Leninism. It
revolves around what one must understand in dialectical thought by
the unity of opposites. Without doubt, it is the question that Mao and
the Chinese communists worked on most assiduously.
Around 1965 there begins in China what the local press, always
inventive when it came to the designation of conflicts, calls a great
class struggle in the field of philosophy. This struggle opposes, on the
one side, those who think that the essence of dialectics is the synthesis
of contradictory terms, and that it is given in the formula one divides
into two, and, on the other side, those who think that the essence of
dialectics is the synthesis of contradictory terms, and that the right
formula is consequently two fuse into one. Apparent scholasticism,
essential truth. For this is in fact a question of the identification of
revolutionary subjectivity, of its constitutive desire. Is it the desire of
division, of war, or is it instead the desire of fusion, of unity, of peace?
In any case, in the China of the time those who hold to the maxim 'one
divides into two' are declared leftists, and rightists those who advocate
'two fuse into one'. Why?
If the maxim of synthesis (two fuse into one) taken as a subjective
formula, as desire of the One, is rightist, it is because in the eyes of the
Chinese revolutionaries it is altogether premature. The subject of this
maxim is yet to fully traverse the Two to the end, it does not yet know
what an integrally victorious class war is. It follows that the One
whose desire it harbors is not yet even thinkable, which means
that under the cover of synthesis, this desire is calling for the old One. This
interpretation of dialectics entails a restoration. In order to not be a
conservative, in order to be a revolutionary activist in the present, one
must instead desire division. The question of novelty immediately
becomes that of the creative scission within the singularity of the
situation.
In China the Cultural Revolution opposes, singularly during the years
'66 and '67, and in the midst of unimaginable fury and confusion, the
partisans of these two versions of the dialectical schema. There are
those who behind Mao, at the time practically in a minority within the
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direction of the Party, think that the socialist State must not be the
policed and police-like end of mass politics, but, on the contrary, that it
must act as a stimulus for the outburst of politics, under the sign of the
march towards real communism. And there are those who, behind Liu
Shaoqi, but especially Deng Xiaoping, think that, economic
management being the principal aspect of things, popular
mobilizations are more nefarious than necessary. The educated youth
will be the spearhead of the Maoist line. The Party cadres and a great
number of the intellectuals will undertake more or less overt
opposition. The farmers will cautiously bide their time. The workers -
the decisive force - will be so torn between rival organizations that in
the end, from '67-'68, it will prove necessary, with the State at risk of
being carried away by the political flood, for the Army to intervene.
There begins a long period of extremely violent and complex
bureaucratic confrontations, not without a number of popular
irruptions, all the way up to the death of Mao (1976), swiftly followed
by the Thermidorian coup that brings Deng to power.
This political hurricane is, as far as its stakes, so novel and at the same
time so obscure, that numerous lessons that it doubtless entails for the
future of the politics of emancipation have yet to be drawn, in spite of
the fact that it provided a decisive inspiration for French Maoism
between 1967 and 1975, the only innovative and consequent political
current of post-May '68. In any case, it is beyond doubt that the
Cultural Revolution signals the closure of an entire sequence, whose
central object is the Party, and whose main political concept is that of
proletariat.
Let it be said in passing that it is fashionable today, among the
restorers of imperial and capitalist servility, to qualify this
unprecedented episode as a bloody and feral power struggle, in which
Mao, a minority in the Chinese Politburo, attempted by any available
means to climb his way back to the top. First of all, one will reply that
to qualify a political episode of this type with the epithet of power
struggle is to attract ridicule by breaking down a wide-open door. The
militants of the Cultural Revolution never stopped quoting Lenin's
declaration (perhaps not his best, but that's another matter) that,
ultimately, the problem is that of power. Mao's threatened position
was one of the explicit stakes of the conflict, as Mao himself officially
indicated. The findings of our sinologist interpreters are nothing but
immanent and public themes of the quasi-civil war that took place in
China between '65 and '76, a war whose properly revolutionary
sequence (in the sense of the existence of new political thought) is to be
found only the initial segment ('65-'68). Besides, since when do our
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known Good is what the status quo establishes as the precious name of
its own subsistence. Extreme violence is therefore reciprocal to
extreme enthusiasm, because it is in effect, to speak like Nietzsche, a
matter of the transvaluation of all values. The Leninist passion for the
real, which is also the passion of thought, is without morality. The
only status of morality, as Nietzsche saw, is genealogical. It is a
residue of the old world. Thus, for a Leninist, the threshold of
tolerance to what, seen from our old and pacified present, is the worst,
is incredibly high, regardless of the camp that one belongs to. This is
obviously what causes some today to speak of the barbarity of the
century. Nevertheless, it is altogether unjust to isolate this dimension
of the passion for the real. Even when it is a question of the
persecution of intellectuals, as disastrous as its spectacle and effects
may be, it is important to recall that what makes it possible is that it is
not the privileges of knowledge that command the political access to
the real. Like Fouquier-Tinville said during the French Revolution,
when judging and condemning to death Lavoisier, the creator of
modern chemistry: The Republic does not need scientists. Barbarous
words if there ever were, totally extremist and unreasonable, but that
must be understood, beyond themselves, in their abridged, axiomatic
form: The Republic does not need. It is not from need, from interest,
or from its correlate, privileged knowledge, that derives the political
capture of a fragment of the real, but from the occurrence of a
collectivisable thought, and from it alone. This can also be stated as
follows: politics, when it exists, grounds its own principle regarding
the real, and thus is in need of nothing, save for itself.
But perhaps it is the case that today every attempt to submit thought to
the ordeal of the real, political or otherwise, is regarded as barbarous.
The passion for the real, much cooled, cedes its place (provisionally?)
to the acceptance, sometimes joyous, sometimes dismal, of reality.
Of course, the passion for the real is accompanied by a proliferation of
semblance. For a revolutionary, the world is the old world, it is replete
with corruption and treachery. The purification, the divestment of the
real, must always begin again.
What must be emphasized is that to purify the real means to extract it
from the reality that envelops and occults it. Whence the violent taste
for surface and transparency. The century attempts to react against
depth. It carries out a fierce critique of foundations and of the beyond,
it promotes the immediate and the surface of sensation. It proposes, as
heir to Nietzsche, to abandon all other-worlds, and to pose that the
real is identical to appearance. Thought, precisely because what drives
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it is not the ideal but the real, must seize hold of appearance as
appearance, or of the real as pure event of its own appearance. To
achieve this, it must destroy every density, every claim to
substantiality, every assertion of reality. It is reality that acts as an
obstacle to the discovery of the real as pure surface. Here lies the
struggle against semblance. But since the semblance-of-reality adheres
to the real, the destruction of semblance comes to be identified with
destruction pure and simple. At the end of its purification, the real, as
total absence of reality, is the nothing. This path, undertaken by
innumerable ventures in the century - political, artistic, scientific
ventures - is the path of terrorist nihilism. Since its subjective
motivation is the passion for the real, it is not a consent to anything, it is
a creation, and one should recognize in it the traits of an active
nihilism.
Where are we today? The figure of active nihilism is regarded as
completely obsolete. Every reasonable activity is limited, limiting,
constrained by the burdens of reality. The best that one can do is to get
away from evil, and to do this, the shortest path is to avoid any contact
with the real. Ultimately one comes up against the nothing, the there-
is-nothing-real, and in this sense one remains in nihilism. But since the
terrorist element, the desire to purify the real, has been suppressed,
nihilism is disactivated. It has become passive, or reactive, nihilism,
that is, hostile to every action as well as to every thought.
The other path that the century sketched out, the one that attempts to
hold onto the passion for the real without falling for the paroxystic
charms of terror, I call the subtractive path: to exhibit as a real point,
not the destruction of reality, but minimal difference. To purify reality,
not in order to annihilate it in its surface, but to subtract it from its
apparent unity so as to detect within it the minuscule difference, the
vanishing term which constitutes it. What barely takes place differs
from the place wherein it takes place. It is in the 'barely' that all the
affect rests, in this immanent exception.
In both of these paths the key question is that of the new. What is the
new? The question obsesses the century, because ever since its
inception the century is invoked as figure of commencement. And first
of all as the (re)commencement of Man: the new man.
This syntagm, perhaps more Stalinist than Leninist, has two opposing
senses.
For a whole host of thinkers, singularly in the ambit of fascist thought,
and without excluding Heidegger, the new man is in great part the
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restitution of the man of old, the one who had been obliterated, who
had disappeared, who had been corrupted. Purification is really the
more or less violent process of the return of a vanished origin. The new
is a production of authenticity. In the final analysis, the task of the
century is seen here as the restitution (of the origin) by the destruction
(of the inauthentic).
For another host of thinkers, particularly in the ambit of Marx-leaning
communism, the new man is a real creation, something which has
never existed before, because it emerges from the destruction of
historical antagonisms. The new man of communism is beyond classes
and beyond the State.
The new man is thus either restored, or produced.
In the first case, the definition of the new man is rooted in mythic
totalities such as race, nation, earth, blood, soil. The new man is a
collection of predicates (nordic, aryan, warrior, etc.).
In the second case, on the contrary, the new man is conceived against
all envelopes and all predicates, in particular against family, property,
the nation-state. This is the project of Engels' book The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and the State. Marx had already underlined that
the universal singularity of the proletariat is to bear no predicate, to
possess nothing, and in particular to have, in the strong sense, no
fatherland. This conception of the new man - anti-predicative, negative
and universal - traverses the century. A very important point here is
the hostility towards the family, as the primordial nucleus of egoism,
of rooted particularity, of tradition and origin. Gide's cry - 'Families, I
hate you' - partakes in the apologetics of the new man thus conceived.
It is very striking to see that the family has once again become, at the
century's end, a consensual and practically unassailable value. The
young love the family, in which moreover they remain until later and
later. The German Green Party, considered to be a protest party
(everything is relative: it is now in government. . .), contemplated at
one point calling itself the party of the family. Even homosexuals,
bearers in the century, as we've just seen with Gide, of a part of the
protest, today demand their insertion within the familial frame, the
tradition, citizenship. See how far we've come! The new man, in the
real present of the century, stood first of all, if one was progressive, for
the escape from family, property and state despotism. Today, it seems
that modernization, as our masters like to call it, amounts to being a
good little dad, a good little mom, a good little son, to become an
efficient employee, to enrich oneself as much as possible, and to play
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